The Impeachment of the House of BrunswickBradlaugh, Charles
History
The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick
Bradlaugh, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- 1714-1837; Hanover, House of
On the 23d of March, Henry Hunt, John Knight, Joseph Johnson, Joseph
Healey, and Samuel Bamford were, after six days' trial at York,
found guilty of unlawfully assembling. Lord Grenville feared that, if
acquitted, Peterloe might form a terrible bill of indictment against
the Ministry. His Lordship writes on March 29th, to the Marquis
of Buckingham: "It would have been a dreadful thing if it had been
established by the result of that trial that the Manchester meeting was
under all its circumstances a legal assembly." His Lordship knew that
the magistrates and yeomanry cavalry might have been indicted for murder
had the meeting been declared legal. Sir C. Wolseley and the Rev, J.
Harrison were at this time being prosecuted for seditious speaking,
and were ultimately found guilty on April 10th. In May the state of the
country was terrible; even Baring, the Conservative banker, on May 7th,
described the "state of England" to a full House of Commons, "in the
most lamentable terms." On the 8th we find Mr. W. H. Fremantle saying of
the King, "His language is only about the Coronation and Lady Conyngham
[his then favorite sultana]; very little of the state of the country."
Early in June, it being known that Queen Caroline was about to return to
England, and that she intended to be present at the Coronation, the
King offered her £50,000 a year for life to remain on the Continent,
and forbear from claiming the title of Queen of England. This Caroline
indignantly refused. The Queen's name had, by an order in Council, and
on the King's direction, been omitted from the Liturgy as that of a
person unfit to be prayed for, and on the 6th of July a bill of pains
and penalties was introduced by Lord Liverpool, alleging adultery
between the Queen and one Bartolomeo Bergami. To wade through the mass
of disgusting evidence offered by the advisers of the King in support
of the bill is terrible work. It seems clear that many of the witnesses
committed perjury. It is certain that the diplomatic force of England
was used to prevent the Queen from obtaining witnesses on her behalf.
Large sums of the taxpayers' money were shown to have been spent in
surrounding the Princess of Wales with spies in Italy and Switzerland.
Naturally the people took sides with the Queen. To use the language of
William Cobbett: "The joy of the people, of all ranks, except nobility,
clergy, and the army and the navy, who in fact were theirs, was
boundless; and they expressed it in every possible way that people can
express their joy. They had heard rumors about a lewd life, and about an
adulterous intercourse. They could not but believe that there was some
foundation for something of this kind; but they, in their justice, went
back to the time when she was in fact turned out of her husband's house,
with a child in her arms, without blame of any sort ever having been
imputed to her. They compared what they had _heard_ of the wife
with what they had _seen_ of the husband, and they came to their
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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